NATIVE GUARD, the Pulitzer Prize winning collection of poetry by former U.S. Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey, will be staged this season at the Atlanta History Center, just steps away from its extraordinary Civil War collection. First adapted for the stage by the Alliance in 2014 to sold-out audiences, NATIVE GUARD juxtaposes the deeply personal experiences of Trethewey, a child of a then illegal marriage between her African-American mother and Caucasian father living in 1960s Mississippi,
with the experience of a soldier in the Native Guard, the first African-American Union troop in the Civil War who was charged with guarding white Confederate captives. Years after her mother’s tragic death, Trethewey reclaims her memory, just as she reclaims the voices of the black soldiers whose service has been all but forgotten.